Saturday, 26 October 2013

We’ll
start with what has become the standard in web analytics tools for businesses
of all shapes and sizes (and it’s not the standard just because it’s free).
Google Analytics is actually one of the most robust and powerful analytics
tools out there. It will help you understand exactly what your visitors are
doing on your site. If you run an e-commerce site, Google Analytics can track
your transaction data and help you identify which pages on your sites drive the
most sales. Beyond user behavior data, Google Analytics does a great job giving
you a sense of your user demographics, showing you where you users are from,
what types of internet browsers they are using, and even the size computer
monitor they are using. While Google Analytics has reams of data available
which can be overwhelming, they have thankfully recently addededucational tipswithin
the application so you can turn to help at any point.

If you want to know how much
traffic your competitors are getting, Compete is the site for you. While
limited to U.S. visitors only, Compete provides competitive data so you can see
exactly how your top competitors are performing online. Compete will also help
you find related sites that you should be keeping an eye on. Compete has a
large suite of advanced, paid tools for deep analysis of advertising data,
sales data, and more. But, for most small businesses, the free offering that
provides competitive traffic data will be plenty useful on its own.

Formerly Google Website Optimizer,
Google has now rolled this tool into the free Google Analytics product. While
we already talked about Google Analytics, this feature is so useful that it’s
worth talking about independently. Very similar to Optimizely, Google Content
Experiments lets you see how two different versions of a web page perform so
you can optimize your site. Unlike Optimizely, you don’t get a point-and-click
interface for making changes to your site, but Google does take care of all the
heavy lifting regarding analyzing the data and telling you which version of the
page is better for you and your businesses. Best of all, this functionality is
free and easy to use.

Thankfully, some of the best social analytics tools are built right
into the tools you are already using. For Twitter, log into their advertising
site and click the “analytics” tab in the top navigation. You don’t have to
advertise on Twitter to use this feature, so you can just ignore their buttons
and links that encourage you to place an ad. Within Twitter’s analytics suite,
you can see who your followers are, where they are from, what they are
interested in, and even get the gender ratio of your followers. You also get an
analysis of your tweets so you can see which tweets reach the most people and
create the most conversion.

Facebook Page Insights [free]If you
run a Facebook page for your business, then the built-in Facebook Page Insights
feature provides detailed analysis of your posts—who they are reaching, who is
liking them, and how your Facebook performance is trending over time. You can
even see data on visits to your Facebook page and where those visitors came from.
Like Twitter Analytics, you can also get summary demographic data on your fans
and the people that read your posts. All in all, Facebook Page Insights
provides fascinating and actionable information so that you can optimize your
Facebook presence and increase your likes and content shares.

Now
that you have all of these tools, the next trick is to figure out what you
should be tracking. If you run a small business, finding the time to analyze
your data can seem like a daunting task. Fortunately it doesn’t have to be, and
I’ll go into more detail about the top metrics you should be tracking in a
follow-up post.